February 29, 2008

Firing Line

The following (in color) is an exchange in a string of responsesconcerning William F. Buckley at Lucianne.com

Reply 16 - Posted by: Muggins, 2/29/2008 8:31:45 AMI've admired Buckley since I watched his Firing Line program in the 1960's. The Hoover Institute seems to own the Firing Line programs and offer a few, abbreviated, low-fidelity clips that can be downloaded in Real Media, as some sort of tease, as frustrating as that is. They intend to digitalize selected Firing Line tapes and ask the public to suggest which programs they should choose to digitalize. Apparently, they intend to charge money. I feel the conservative message, and what better than Buckley's Firing Line, should be broadcast over the TV airwaves, once again, to a much broader audience than would be the small set of people who would purchase the programs from the Hoover Institute.

Reply 23 - Posted by: Liberty7, 2/29/2008 9:45:16 AMRe #16; Firing Line started out on commercial TV but moved to public broadcasting after about 5 years. I always thought it a little weird that this conservative icon should be socialist TV star. But now some appear to want the program nationalized again and made available to the masses on some subsidized basis. Weird.

Reply 45 - Posted by: Muggins, 2/29/2008 2:14:34 PM#23Surely you can recognize the difference between commercial TV in 1966, and commercial TV now. Not only do we have to pay for our cable TV programming, nowadays, but we have to watch commercials. Does that make oldtime commercial TV socialistic and weird? It seems to me that today's commercial TV is weird, since we have to pay to watch commercials. Anyhow, I was a teenager when I first started watching Buckley. There was a wider audience for his message, something that I'd like to see happen again. If they want to show that on cable, fine, but if it's to be limited to a purchase item from Hoover, I think it would limit the scope and size of the audience. We want to get the word out, not preach to an exclusive group. I want the conservative movement to grow and Buckley is just the ticket.